


Soft Chaos

by Radiolaria



Series: Meta Essays [17]
Category: Dark Matter (TV)
Genre: Archived From Tumblr, Archived From onaperduamedee Blog, Fanwork Research & Reference Guides, Found Family, Gen, Identity Issues, Meta Essay, Nonfiction, Vigilantism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-15
Updated: 2018-12-15
Packaged: 2019-09-18 17:58:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16999875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Radiolaria/pseuds/Radiolaria
Summary: A love letter to Dark Matter and its resistance against bleak order.





	Soft Chaos

**Author's Note:**

> Originally published on Aug. 13, 2017 on [](https://onaperduamedee.tumblr.com/post/164141759493/thats-essentially-what-i-love-about-dark-matter).

That's essentially what I love about Dark Matter: this willingless not to let people succumb to the stark vastness and coldness of space. 

They are a bunch of forgetful mercenaries stranded together. By the end of the first episodes, they are already saving people together.

Because they are lost, they keep being found by their past. They keep on going after each other. In conflicts, in evil scientist's lairs.

They pick up stray cats. Whose causes become theirs and they fight for them and their treacherous crushes, but they eventually let them go, because they have nothing in this world, but this ship and each other. 

They are not good guys in any way, but they are also such softies. They have such drive to change who they are that, striving to do so, they change the world and the people around them. For better or worse. But they refuse to settle for what is. 

Their path is chaos and malleability and broken status quo, because they are bad guys. And that's what bad guys do. They don't follow the rules. You can't even expect them not to become heroes and not to become who they want to be, while they're at it: family, better, free, etc. 

They can repeat all they want they're only after survival, but survival is exactly that: sticking together, breaking patterns and rules, change, agency, and I love Dark Matter for this core of hope among edgy fictions that are only interested in discussing how you can still be good while doing bad things for survival. 

From the start, the show warns they are bad guys, and Two - O Captain, my Captain - goes "no computer file is going to tell me who I am" and it clicks: this story will be about breaking rules, labels, courses set. People will change, the world will change, and, for the outcast and lost, it's a marvellous certainty and source of freedom to hang onto. The most uncertain of certainties, but still it's looking at the dark of space and thinking "this isn't rock, we can take it" and I am into that message these days. 

I love Dark Matter.


End file.
